Monthly Archives: March 2012

Once again the work is going slower than I would like. But finally after three and a half weeks another page is completed. This is just a portion of the page. I’ll leave you to wonder what is going on.

A selection from page 22

I definitely will not be doing the next book with so much detail. I will be going for simple, less structured design. You may recall from a previous post that the drawings and paintings in my early books were the part I loved. I spent hours going over every detail.

My granddaughter is here tonight and she loves to sit beside me and give me lots of constructive help. She was my little girl model when I started this project and I am glad I had all the sketches done in a few weeks. She looks and acts so much older now. It is amazing how fast they change between four and almost six. She also is becoming an artist and has no limit to her questions and suggestions of what she would like better if only I would go back through and change all the pages that the better color would be on.

She also has her favorite drawings. And I printed a copy of the book with only a small portion of the drawings colorized. She loves it and has spent many hours this past year going over every single detail.

Good morning readers. Just because I have been busy with family and photos and work, I don’t want to let you think I have ignored my WIP. This is a portion of page 11 of the book. Since I am working on them in Dummy format this is the right hand side of the page and on the left side is page 22. I will split them apart later to re-set them up as double page spreads for any submissions. But since I am still vacillating between POD and traditional I chose to do the hard part first.

Amanda Twirls

It has been a learning experience. At times tedious and discouraging as I figured out how to create on my computer screen. But as I get better, the drawings improve and become faster to create.

I can visualize exactly how I want each page to be, but my skills have always lagged behind my vision. I wore out big erasers long before the pencils and often just had to start over and over again when I wore through the paper. At least on the computer I can work until I get it right, but boy am I SLOW.

I have discovered I am at times too detailed, but then some of the best children’s books are extremely detailed. My admiration for their work knows no bounds.

My favorite book for illustration is Children’s Book Illustration and Design edited by Julie Cummins and published by PBC International Library of Applied Design. It is a treasure trove of some of the best work by 80 renown kid-lit illustrators. I can get lost in that book for hours at a time. When the grandchildren were very little we would “read” the book by pointing out items they knew and telling them the word, that progressed to asking them to “find the kitty” and then having them repeat the word kitty. Not hard things or obscure items but ordinary things like; dog, cup, door, flower, car, etc. As they got older we moved into finding colors or shapes and the natural progression was to figure out what was going on in the picture. That was always fun as we would imagine or make up a story about what was happening.

For me the pictures have always been the most important thing. Even when I was very young I found the beauty there before I could read the words. I would study the drawings for hours.

Bye for today. Wishing you all safe and happy days until I check in next.